Before you get too excited, keep in mind that this is still an Alpha, so don’t put it into production. And, since it is an Alpha, it is not available on Elastic Cloud. But, because Elastic Cloud is the official hosted Elasticsearch and Kibana offering on AWS, you’ll be able to deploy the 5.0 releases on Elastic Cloud the day of 5.0 GA.* (We wouldn’t want you to wait for all this goodness!)

If you open a bug report, today, you too can become an Elastic Pioneer. And now, without further ado, some highlights from Alpha 3.

Elasticsearch

For more detailed information, and many other features, peruse the Elasticsearch detail post.

Setting Changes - Reducing ambiguity through refactoring. Major releases are the perfect time for this.

Indexing Performance - Concurrent updates require a lock. Reducing the contention in this lock has resulted in a significant performance boost.

Painless Scripting - Dynamic scripting now almost as fast as static, plus the new language is easier to use.

Plus dots in field names, shard allocation diagnostics, and more.

From 2.3.x to 5.0. The magical journey. The undiscovered country. The next frontier. Other coined phrases. As a reminder, we've also released the Migration Helper, which runs on your existing 2.3 cluster. Use this site plugin to prep for your migration.

Kibana

For more detailed information, and all the PR links in one place, visualize the future in the Kibana detail post.

Tons of bug fixes and stability improvements in Kibana core

UI in X-Pack for managing users and roles

PDF reports in X-Pack are now processed in the background and are listed within Kibana for future access

Beats

We dropped a beat. Say hello to Metricbeat. Metricbeat takes everything that was great about Topbeat and extends it to also collect metrics from servers like Apache, Nginx, Mysql, Redis, and others.

Filtering - Filter actions can be applied to an event before sending to an output. Now they also support conditionals so you have a lot flexibility in deciding what data gets indexed.

Simpler Configuration - We reworked our configuration files to be more pleasant to work with, while still providing a lot of information in comments.

ES-Hadoop

ES-Hadoop v 5.0.0-alpha3 has also been released today. Peruse all the information in the detail post.

The Oncoming Storm - In Alpha 3, Storm support has been upgraded to 1.0.x

*Author's note: This sentence previously conveyed that Elastic Cloud would be the only place to get the 5.0 releases of the Elastic Stack and X-Pack. We apologize for the confusion and have corrected that statement. On that oh-so-magical day of GA, the 5.0 releases will be available for download or via Elastic Cloud.